Stars
by Rhyolight04
Summary: Sherlock's voice came softly out of the gloom. "Who were you speaking to?" "When?" "When you said 'Please, God, let me live.'" It stands alone, but it may be taken as part of the Recovery Position universe or the Different Position universe (which encompasses Advice for the Lovelorn). It insisted on taking place after 'Hounds.'


John knew waiting. He didn't dislike it. Sherlock had admitted the odds were long when he suggested the undertaking. Events in the matter had taken place over months rather than days (the 11th or the 17th or the 23rd—smugglers who liked prime numbers). There was really no telling whether any contraband would move that night—but it was a 17th with a waning moon, and why not? John was very glad to fall in with Sherlock's hare-brained scheme (Sherlock's term) and try a little surveillance out in the suburbs. Lestrade had allowed there was some plausibility to Sherlock's theory. Now they sat in his car ("No chases, no using it as a means of GBH, and bring it back with the petrol tank full—"), the windows open to the April night. Distant traffic and dogs, an owl, faint herbal smells. Nothing like diesel or latrine or explosive.

John had waited, without even this much focus, more hours than Sherlock had had hot dinners (ha, ha). Had waited with the best of them. Had Waited For England. It was pleasant to be sitting down, without a rifle; to wait without wondering if a moment's inattention would kill him. Must be very nearly two years now since he'd been on guard officially. He hadn't been keeping track of the date at the time he left active duty (a Monday or Tuesday? in June?); the weeks afterward had been spent in a haze of chemicals and pain. John kept track of some anniversaries, but he'd let this one go.

Sherlock's voice came softly out of the gloom. "Who were you speaking to?"

"When?"

"When you said 'Please, God, let me live.'"

No point in asking where that had come from. John supposed the trend of his thoughts was obvious to someone who watched him the way Sherlock watched everyone. (Did he, really, watch everyone the same way? Probably not; John was available for longitudinal study. Everyone said he was unique.)

"No idea."

"Rubbish, John. And don't sigh at me. It's not like I asked about your sex life."

"Most people think religion is just about as private. More." Particularly if you were Sherlock's flatmate.

Sherlock expelled a sigh like a locomotive coming to rest. "And yet there are no historic brothels in every parish, let alone, I don't know—what would you compare a cathedral to, a fifty-storey love hotel?"

"And there, any possibility of my ever answering you, right out the window."

"Was it the sacrilege or your reverence for England's historic heritage?"

"General snark."

Complete silence.

"Why do you ask, anyway?" John enquired. "No one arguing with you enough lately? I'd've thought that cat-fight you had with Anderson about latent prints would have left you set up for a couple of weeks."

"No point in arguing about theology, John. I just wondered how you managed it."

"What?"

"Belief."

"Wait, what do you think I believe in?"

"That was what I was asking. You trained as a scientist."

"And I practice as one, too, thank you very much. I get the journals. I even read them."

"You use arnica ointment."

"Works for me, works for a lot of plastic surgeons; I'm not going to sweat the theory."

"Is that how you manage to believe in God? Triggering a placebo effect?"

John took a deep breath. "We're dialling this back. Let's try making it less personal, and if I say we change the subject, you drop it without being triumphal at me."

"I am never triumphal. Except when I'm right," Sherlock added.

"Which is always, isn't it?"

"Not… actually. In fact, about people's inner lives (assuming they have such), from what I'm told… no. I think the kindest way anyone's ever put it was 'lacking in imaginative sympathy."

"I just didn't think her calling you 'an unfeeling bastard' was accurate."

"She didn't appreciate your making the distinction, but I did."

"It wasn't going to work out with her anyway."

"I told you that. About ten minutes before she called me an unfeeling bastard."

"I would have liked to take longer before finding out that you were right. Specifically, sometime after a dirty weekend anywhere outside the M-25. But you pushed all of her buttons."

"She had so very many buttons."

"I'd prefer to drive my girlfriends away myself."

Sherlock, for a wonder, didn't answer that. Spoilt for choice. "Is it really less uncomfortable to talk about sex than religion?" he asked.

"It depends. In my family, when I was young, definitely not. With Harry now… God, neither. But with friends… maybe, yes. Not unusual to get maudlin about lost loves after a couple of pints."

"You recently explained at wearisome length that sex and love are completely different."

"I did, yes. Hm. I don't think anyone ever talks about 'that insane prayer experience they had over last Bank Holiday.' Not in any church I ever went to, anyway."

"They did, that time I was in Florida. Several different people. 'Testifying', they said."

"Well. Americans. Though they're not all like that."

"No. And I know an ex-burglar in Rotherhithe who is like that, so it isn't just Americans. But your family were Roman Catholic."

"Only slightly more than your family were C of E."

"That was the church we did not attend, yes. Well. Twice a year."

"Were you baptised? Was Mycroft?" John thought it must not have taken; the water pearling off Mycroft's infant head, shrinking away from the mystical Teflon.

"I've seen the pictures, so we must both have been. Not confirmed; my father was out of the picture by then."

"Your mother wasn't religious?"

"My mother was half French and did not care about the Done Thing as much as my father. Neither of them were religious. Your mother? Father? was?"

"My mother. My father went along with her but if he could avoid anything to do with church, he did. My mum—Harry called it her version of 'fire insurance'," John said.

Sherlock waited for him to continue. And waited.

"When I said it would have been easier to talk about religion than sex in my family, I may have exaggerated," John said at last. "It was true until I was about eight. At least, we never talked about sex. Then the religious questions started making my mum uncomfortable-her fault for sending us to Jesuit schools. But we did the whole first Communion thing. And later I got confirmed to see if it would make any difference."

"Did it?"

"Made my grandmother happy."

"You were disappointed."

"I was. They call it the Sacrament of Exit, you know."

"But you were still devout. Until university, I think?"

"Devout is probably the wrong word… .Why am I talking about this with you, again?"

"Because I asked."

"Because we're bored? 'Ask John anthropological questions?'"

"No. 'Ask John…Watson-ological questions.'"

"What I mean is, Sherlock, is the next time we're looking at a body in a vicarage, is something I say in this conversation going to come out as a foil for a flippant remark about clerical privilege or credulity or —"

"The next time we find a body in a vicarage, _vel sim_, what you say may cause me to recall that the symbolic importance of an ecclesiastical person or place is worth my taking it into consideration. "

"Still data, then?"

"Of course it is, John, why wouldn't it be?" Sherlock twisted his entire upper body to look irritably at John. "It's data that makes a difference. It's information about why you are the person you are. I am in no position to criticise the result. I don't think I'll understand, in whatever your 'imaginatively sympathetic' way would be; but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate it."

There were more stars visible through the windscreen, even in the hazy sky, than there had been that night in London. "I am … the cosmos?"

"Most people are the chaos," Sherlock told him simply, as though that, too, made sense. "I can't guarantee it will affect my way of interacting with anyone, but you can hope. Since you're so invested in my good behaviour."

"I would prefer for people not to call you an unfeeling bastard, particularly if you want them to consult with you on cases."

"No, you would prefer not to think they might be right. You care too much about what other people think."

"And you don't care enough."

"See? We average to the mean. Synthesis. Why isn't 'devout' the right word?"

John gave it some thought. "When I hear the word, it sounds like something you'd see from the outside, not something I'd feel from the inside. Although. Okay, look, I went to a Roman Catholic primary school and a Roman Catholic secondary school, and it wasn't horrible. At all. As far as I know no one was being molested. A couple of the teachers were senile and I didn't like all of them, but I really liked my schools as a whole."

"You don't have to be defensive."

"I am, though."

"John, I'm judgemental about so many other things, you should be accustomed to it."

"Actually, this isn't about you. I don't understand it, Sherlock, but you have never once been snotty about religion. Or priests, or any of it."

"Probably just lack of an occasion, if that makes you feel better. So you're embarrassed about liking your Catholic school, but not because it's me. And it isn't just the pedophilia scandals. Is it just because you had faith, at one time? No. Worse. What's worse to John Watson?" Sherlock gave his friend some space. It was not filled. He ventured. "Disloyalty, I think? To…your parents? You liked school better than being at home. I can see how that might have—"

"I don't think you can," John interrupted. "Harry and I weren't—weren't terribly bright, like you and Mycroft, but we were damn well better educated than our parents, and it wasn't really all right with them. They knew we liked school and they couldn't see why. When I was about six, my parents went through a bad patch—well, no, they never got through it; but things got ropey and there was yelling. And lying, lots of lying. And…misplaced anger." Sherlock continued quiet, for a wonder. "We spent a lot of time walking on eggshells, but we never were sure where the eggshells were."

"My parents were very clear, most of the time."

"They were differently messed-up from mine, then. So. School was better than home, a lot of the time—strict, but they told you what the rules were, there."

("Army," murmured Sherlock: a footnote, not an interruption. John nodded.

"Probably, yeah.) So school was—a rational place. I loved the orderliness. I liked the Mass, too. And the way I was taught it, the faith made sense. We had the Bible, but it was—let me get this right— 'a witness to the Word of God.' A way of describing people's understanding of how things were between God and them. Not a history book or a manual of morals. And the faith had an awful lot stuck onto it since the first century AD; but if you looked at it historically, the accretions made sense. Not scientific sense, but for the time, for the kind of arguments going on."

"If you look at Christianity scientifically, you find you can't," Sherlock pointed out.

"It was never meant to be the same kind of truth as Newton and Archimedes and Leeuwenhoek. All the mess came from getting the Bible kind of truth mixed up with science, before people knew how science worked. That material facts aren't the same as, as spiritual, psychological truths," John said.

Sherlock made a faint derisive noise through his nose. John made a similar, dismissive one back at him and continued. "They didn't have science the way we do. They couldn't. The Bible wasn't that kind of book, ever." He had a calm, steady, mulish tone that Sherlock knew came from hours of argument.

"It is now, according to some people."

"Yeah well, the Biblical-inerrant crowd are terrible literary scholars, was what I learned. Catholics have less of a tradition of Bible-thumping. We're supposed to be priest-ridden, and on the whole that's much better because some priests encourage people to form their conscience, not just 'pay, pray, and obey.'"

"It must have been a good school," Sherlock said.

"It was for me. Didn't matter what A-levels you wanted, you damn well learned philosophy and history as well. And I had a couple of teachers who were well aware of the times the Church had gotten it wrong."

"Galileo?"

"I was more taken with Giordano Bruno. Said the stars were suns with other worlds around them. They burned him for it." John was quiet for a moment. "The bloke who said that 'power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely' was talking about the Church. But messed-up as it was—is—, the Church taught me why I ought to be angry about the things that I'm angry about when it doesn't uphold them."

"I beg your pardon?"

"That persons matter more than things; that persons matter, even women and slaves. Christianity was very clear that women had souls, at a time that none of the big thinkers much thought so. And in the ancient world and the Middle Ages, it offered them a place to go besides marriage, and said forced marriage was wrong. And it taught—teaches-that sex and marriage aren't just about children."

"And homosexuals? 'Intrinsically disordered'?" Sherlock's voice held an edge that John noted for reflection some other time.

"If you think you're only on earth to have children, it really is kind of fucked. But, if you think people are more than vehicles for their genes…or if you pick up _after_ Aristotle, and actually do natural history—one thing I cannot forgive the church for is deciding to ignore everything since Darwin. Compared to some other churches even that's is relatively forward-looking, I suppose. And big institutions aren't good at moving fast, but that's the trouble with becoming a big institution: forgetting why it's there in the first place. Exactly what I was taught that Jesus criticised about the religious establishment in his day. I don't think he would have been quick to say much about any great mass of people; he wasn't known for looking at people as classes rather than individuals."

"It's telling that you've been talking this long about your church without even mentioning Christ."

"It is," John agreed. "If you want the difference between Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants, there it is. Catholics get every good thing and every mistake anyone's ever made, instead of going it alone with the Bible and a personal saviour."

"You want to tell me that a man was born of a virgin in an occupied province of Rome, died in a political/religious muddle, was raised three days later, ascended into Heaven, and all the rest? Miracles, John?"

"The miracles are a distraction. I want to tell you I don't think any of that is nearly as important as loving my neighbour as myself."

"Your 'caring.'"

"Yeah. That. Though," John added, "there are different ways to show it." Sherlock's passion for justice was less abstract than he liked people to know. John had seen it looking surprisingly flexible.

"You would have anyway," said Sherlock after a moment.

"I'm not sure I would have, without two thousand years of people telling my ancestors and my society and me that it was important. Giving me contradictory messages about who my neighbour is, who my brothers and sisters are, but always trying to get me to see 'us' farther away from where I feel comfortable."

"Being kind so you can go to 'Heaven'."

"Don't mock it; if that's what it takes to make people kinder, it's something."

"And can you justify making the same people afraid of Hell for eating meat on Fridays in Lent and desiring their neighbour instead of his wife?"

"You mean his son instead of his daughter; both of your neighbours are married," John pointed out.

"I forgot about adultery. But they're hardly the same class of offence, either of them."

"No, of course not, but I can't justify making most people fear Hell anyway. Destroying people in order to save them."

Sherlock snorted.

"I know all the very real things you're going to bring up," John told him. "Don't even start on the Inquisition."

"You'd prefer I remained _ad hominem_?"

"It's where we started the evening, isn't it?" John stretched, as best he could in the cramped front seat of the car. "I haven't talked this much philosophy since the upper sixth."

"I haven't talked this much philosophy _ever_. I much prefer science."

"You can't do science without an implied philosophy—"

"I've managed."

"That's you being an island again, Sherlock."

"I like it there. Things make sense, for the most part."

"It's about the other part, then; faith in something outside, if you prefer."

"Oh, please, don't 'Higher Power' me."

"I won't, as long as you don't belittle the people it works for." Actually, John realised, there it was once again—a whole class of people Sherlock had never sneered at. Himself as an addict, yes, far too often. Not so nasty about others.

"I am aware that some people need a crutch."

"Oooh, mistake there." John leapt on it. "Not everyone's leg is as easy to fix as mine was. I put sprained knees in support bandages all the time and I am delighted when their owners have the sense to use a crutch—"

"Very well, yes, point taken, 'crutch is not dishonourable or a sign of moral weakness'—although it was argued that the drugs were a 'crutch', too."

"I don't fancy a crutch that's also gnawing your legs off. Do you want to talk about the physiology of addiction now?"

"Not now. We left the topic of John Watson's own faith sometime back."

"You're relentless."

"One of my salient qualities." Sherlock let the silence lie for a few moments. "Yours, too, of course, if differently expressed. I can't see you giving up easily."

"What makes you sure I have?"

"I'm not; that was what I asked in the first place: Who was it you spoke to when you said 'Please God let me live'?"

John sighed, not so much at his flatmate's persistence as at some other kind of weariness.

"I think I had faith—proper Roman Catholic faith-once," he said finally. "I don't remember a particular time I felt I lost it. _'You have made us for Yourself, o Lord, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You._' I had that sometimes." For a moment John returned to the place of quiet, of pre-Newtonian calm; a vision of his heart secure like an egg in the nest, surrounded by the spheres of Heaven enclosing one another.

"It couldn't have lasted," Sherlock said, almost gently. "You think too well to be a loyal son. I'm amazed you managed in the army."

"Oh, it broke even before that. If you mean the Church. Faith was always bigger than just the Church, though."

"So what happened with the Church?"

"I haven't thought about it in years, really." John paused. "I suppose I couldn't overlook the inconsistencies," he said, finally. "I remember when we got a new pastor who fired all the staff—he wanted a clean slate—even though the Church is big on the right of workers to organise. And of course he was preaching the straight-up procreative kind of sex, which my mother just tore into one Sunday in the car park." It was a cherished memory.

"What happened?" Sherlock asked.

"She said, if human life was important at all, we'd damn well better not start one without meaning it, and if any of our friends needed money for condoms we could ask her any time. I think Harry was thirteen or so; her eyes about fell out of her head. My mum could be all right, sometimes." John smiled. "And later, sixth-form, I had a girl-friend—not that kind, I mean A Friend Who Was A Girl—who was really keen; she wanted to be a priest and she was determined to get all the theology and do a better job with it. There are pastoral things you can do without being ordained. But one day, she said, she found herself sounding exactly like she had an abusive husband, you know—'the church really wasn't like that, it meant well, it got so many things right, if people like her left it would never get any better, it didn't mean to hurt people'… and I saw how sad she was. And she really cared, really believed. By the time I went to uni I had stopped going, other things on my mind… And…then our parents died a year apart. Which really didn't have any effect on my faith or lack of it or anything, despite what you'd think. My mother went suddenly and my father broke down and went slow. Harry and I didn't know the parish anymore; it was mostly my mum's friends who helped us get everything planned. More of an effect on me as a doctor, really. I hope. I don't remember thinking anything much about God for years, unless you count the ethics classes in medical training."

"They mentioned God in ethics training for doctors? Inevitable, I suppose."

"Not really. The professors didn't; some of the students did. That was probably how I came to dislike the word 'devout', the ones who argued about what 'God wanted' instead of what the patients needed—and what the doctors needed, my professor tried to point out. Not that most us would admit we'd ever need anything. I did meet some amazing chaplains, not just RC, of course, who helped people in ways a doctor or a social worker couldn't have. God's love in action, if you like."

"What, by making them feel like 'everything happened for a reason'?"

"That actually works for some people, and unlike you, if someone's found a thread to hang by, I'm not going to tell them what I think of it," John said. "But I never met a decent chaplain who believed that."

"Really? I thought falling back on 'God's mysterious ways' was standard."

"Oh, it is…but it's an easy answer, and if it's an easy answer to suffering it's wrong."

"So what did they do?" Sherlock asked after a while.

"They made patients feel they weren't alone."

"One of the things I hate most about hospitals is that they never do leave you alone—"

"No, honestly, do you practise getting things wrong? Not like that. When you're the one in the bed and you don't know how long you're going to be there; when it's your child or your parent or someone you love in pain and you can't do anything about it—it can help to know you're connected to people who care. To something bigger than yourself who cares. That something out there cares."

"Well, it doesn't," said Sherlock, with perfect faith. "The universe is hostile to life."

"But life exists anyway."

"It's an accident of mathematics."

John looked at his friend's profile in the half-light, thinking of the thousand million, million, MILLION accidents that had led to the man sitting beside him, to whom he'd become and what he did.

"It doesn't really matter what you do, then; but you do it anyway."

"Turned out the Work was more interesting than killing myself with cocaine."

"A lot of people would find that cold, but for you 'interesting' isn't cold at all."

A small nod, an incalculable softening of expression, indicated that Sherlock was pleased with his insight. "But you. And God. What next, John? You entered the army…?"

"How do you know there was anything next? Why couldn't I just have been, I don't know—like swearing, falling into that by reflex?"

"Because you're so defensive, first of all. Is it so awful, for me to hear how you found God again?"

"If I did, God went straight back into the couch cushions once I got home, honestly Sherlock, you're making too much of this."

"Please tell me it wasn't in a woman's—" (manufactured hesitation) "—arms—"

"Bugger off, Sherlock. I hate you sometimes." The thing with his flatmate, John reflected, was that he was never at a loss for something worse than anything anyone might say. "No. Actually, it was times a bit like this: waiting and watching. I was a bunch of different places before Afghanistan, but most of them were heavily settled. My last deployment, I ended up in some of the quietest country I've ever been, and it turns out I loved it. The sky…I make fun of you about that—"

"I'll never be able to delete it again, if that makes you happy—"

"But it wasn't till I was standing guard at night there that I really understood, at all, how different stars and planets look, how it would have been without knowing all the physics _some_ of us get in school. How the sky moves at night—I know, it's 'how the Earth moves', but you're there, looking, for hours, feeling like the like pin in the centre of a turntable, watching it go around you. As different from what's out there tonight as the sun is from a lightbulb. And I liked feeling small and quiet and insignificant, believe it or not. Just still being part of it. Having the capacity to admire it."

"_When I consider thy heavens…_" Sherlock murmured. John looked at him in surprise.

"Years of morning assembly," Sherlock said. "And I had to sing it, before my voice changed. Look, now: mutual assured destruction."

"That was it," John said. _"'The moon and the stars that you set firm. What are human beings that you spare a thought for them, or the child of Adam that you care for him?'"_

"You have to admit our version is prettier. But it meant something to you, out there."

"It did. It stuck in my mind, night after night. I thought that if people invented God, they did it so they would have someone they could say 'thank you' to. For the beauty in the world, and for being able to recognise it."

"And for 'sparing my life when the bombs went off'?" Sherlock asked. John gave him credit for attempting to keep his disdain in check.

"No, no, that never answered. Because of the people who weren't spared; there was no reason, Sherlock, there was nothing like that unless you believe in a God who likes to cripple children and pull the wings off flies. I had to believe God had nothing to do with that beyond the mistake of allowing intelligent life."

"Hardly a God who would listen when you wanted to live."

"A message in a bottle. To Whom It May Concern. Not the kind of belief you were looking for, I'm afraid."

"More interesting, though," Sherlock told him. "You don't believe in God the way you were taught to, but you let the things you were taught _about God_ influence the way you think."

"Because even if I can't use the same reasoning, I like the results, by and large," John said. "I want people to love their neighbours as themselves, and I want them to see their neighbours in unlikely places. Most of the people I knew in the army weren't giving up their lives for NATO or even to fight terrorism; they were in the army for a career or a lark or a purpose of some kind, but they literally gave up their lives for their friends. And sometimes people live for others; not just in a wretched codependent way, but because it makes their own lives mean something." He held his breath. Sherlock's destruction of emotions he didn't understand was impersonal, but that didn't make the barbs hurt any less.

But Sherlock remained contemplative, not scornful. "That ends up being a philosophy, not a religion."

"Does it matter?"

"Perhaps it doesn't; you seem to manage. I don't understand how you think, but that may be because you've finished thinking about it and are just acting on your convictions. Not that that would be such a terrible thing, given your convictions."

"No, that would be terrible," John said. "I see it all around, people not bothering to look again at what they've always thought. Not taking in the newer evidence—that's how decent people end up being bigots."

"What I really don't understand is how you can act as though people might one day actually consider loving their neighbours. We see all the time how they murder their families and strangers and their friends, sometimes over misunderstandings and sometimes over things that are perfectly clear but that they find unacceptable."

"Oh, that's easy. There's an old story about someone coming up to a rabbi a long time ago, asking to be told the important bits of the Law while he was standing on one foot."

"Which was?"

"'Don't do to others what you wouldn't have done to yourself.'"

"Right, and? I assume you're going to tell me a Christian version?"

"Less of a how-to, more of an explanation. The meaning of the gospel, the 'good news', is that left to themselves, people will tend to screw up."

"How is that good news?"

"The good news," said John, "is that that's not the whole story."

Sherlock thought about that for a few moments. "It seems rather optimistic."

"Maybe it is. But it covers the available evidence. Keeps me from being too despairing to notice the good bits."

"But then why are you still surprised when I contaminate the cooking area?"

John made a short whuff of laughter. "I keep thinking I'll find the right threat to make you stop doing it. The dissected intestinal tract last month…words fail me."

"'Where is your God now?'" said Sherlock in an awe-ful voice with gong overtones.

"Nowhere in particular and everywhere at all. An _un_intelligible sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. There is no God and He is always with you."

"Watching over me ineffectively. I'd rather have John Watson."

John squirmed. The compliment was most likely one of Sherlock's rhetorical flourishes, but it warmed him anyway. "It's not like you don't get both of us together."

AN:

_There's no canonical reason to assign either John or Sherlock to any religious tradition, either in BBC or ACD canon; but at the time they were growing up, many even secular schools had Morning Assembly, with Church of England-compliant readings and prayers that would leave even Sherlock with hard-to-delete material. I've heard it said Martin Freeman is Roman Catholic, and I've read him saying he believes in God, which has provided more fics than this one with a hook to make John Catholic._

_When I consider the heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast ordained - Psalm 8, KJV/Authorized Version, which could have been used in Church of England schools; John is familiar with the New Jerusalem Bible, used in Roman Catholic English-speaking congregations outside the US._


End file.
